Autophone is one of the few test frameworks for measuring page load performance and testing video playback on real Android devices. Although Autophone failures will not cause checkins to the tree to be backed out, developers need to be aware of Autophone and how to respond when their patches have been identified as regressing Autophone.

Mozilla developers can find more information about Autophone, what the tests actually measure and how to run try builds against Autophone at Autophone for developers on wiki.mozilla.org.

Improved graphing solution to better support the increased number of repositories and devices.

Autophone bugs are filed under Testing:Autophone in bugzilla. If you have problems using Autophone or would like to make suggestions, please file an Autophone bug. If you would like to reach out directly, I am usually available on irc.mozilla.org as bc in #ateam or #mobile.

During a move from vSphere 5.0 to 5.5 I ran into errors using the Perl scripts provided with the VMware vSphere Perl SDK for 5.5 on Fedora 20. The symptom was the following response to calling vminfo.pl:

The recommended solution was to use an older version of libwww-perl, in particular 5.837. But many of the packages on my system depend on libwww-perl and I didn’t want to mess with such a critical piece of my environment. The solution was to download the older version of libwww-perl, install it into a non-system location and to set the environment variable PERL5LIB to point to the new location before calling the vSphere Perl SDK scripts.

After wandering twisty little passages, all alike concerning rooting Android devices I decided the best way forward for devices with unlocked bootloaders was to root via modifying the default.prop values in the boot image. There are a number of different scripts available on various sites which purport to unpack and pack Android boot images, but it seemed that the best approach was to go to the source and see how Android dealt with boot images.

I created spbootimg and pkbootimg from the official mkbootimg in order that it would properly handle official android boot images at least.

You can download the source for spbootimg and pkbootimg and build it yourself. I don’t provide binaries because I do not wish people who do not understand the consequences of their actions to brick their devices.

pkbootimg

pkbootimg takes the output of spbootimg: a kernel file, a ramdisk file, an optional ramdisk file; and using the command line, board, page size and address information discovered in the original boot image, packs them into a new boot image which can be flashed onto a device using fastboot.

default.prop

Looking at the source for adb.c, we see that at a minimum we need a build of adb where ALLOW_ADBD_ROOT was set and either of the following was set in the ramdisk’s default.prop:

ro.secure=0

or

ro.debuggable=1
service.adb.root=1

ro.secure=0 will result in adbd running as root by default. ro.debuggable=1 and service.adb.root=1 will allow you to run adbd as root via the adb root command.

If your device’s version of adb was not built with ALLOW_ADBD_ROOT set, you will need to build your own version and place it in the ramdisk at sbin/adbd.

Once you are able to run adb as root via adb root, you will be able to remount the /system/ directory as writable and can install anything you wish.

su

Some of the automation used in mozilla requires the use of a version of the su command which has the same command line syntax as sh. In particular, we require that su support calling commands via su -c "command args...". You can possibly build your own version of su which will run commands as root without access control or you can use one of the available “Superuser” apps which manage access to su and provide some degree of security. I’ve found Koushik Dutta’s Superuser to work well with Android up to 4.4.

If you use Koushik’s Superuser, you will need at least version 1.0.3.0 and will need to make sure that the install-recovery.sh script is properly installed so that Koushik’s su runs as a daemon. This is automatically handled if you install Superuser.apk via a recovery image, but if you install Superuser manually, you will need to make sure to unpack Superuser.apk and manually install:

Almost 13 years ago, I was a member of Netscape’s Technology Evangelism team tasked with helping promote a web based upon standards that could be accessed by anyone, using any browser on any operating system. Netscape is no more and the web is a much different place than it was in late 2000. In 2004 Firefox showed that alternative browsers were a reality and opened opportunities for others such as Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. Apple and Google brought alternative devices such as smartphones and tablets to the web that were inconceivable in 2000.

By limiting their web site to Internet Explorer, the State of Oregon forces their citizens to use not only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but also Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Users of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, OS X, or Linux are excluded from using a public web service to obtain a Federally mandated insurance policy.

There is simply no excuse for an Internet Explorer only web site to be developed in the 2013!

The future belongs to developers and browsers which support standards. If you fail to take advantage of the coming change in browsers, your competitors will eat your lunch. Once that happens, the only place your web site will be found is on the web archive.

19:00 PM PT – Both 00_23_76_96_cc_6f_nexus-one and c8_aa_21_ac_0c_b5_droid-pro showed an inability to properly detect and use the external sdcard. I cycled through most of the previously used sdcards attempting to find ones that worked. After checking almost all of the remaining older cards, I found one that worked in the droid-pro but could not find a card that would work with the nexus-one. In my attempt to get a working patch for bug 933842 – Add ability to specify test root in SUTAgent.ini, I realized that mozdevice’s devicemanager.getDeviceRoot() caches the reported value of the test root. Since the autophone workers survive the rebooting of a device, the cached test root value is reused until the device’s worker is restarted. This means that once an incorrect test root is detected, it will not be corrected by rebooting the device. I am testing an preliminary version of the patch for bug 933842 on the nexus one which forces the test root to /mnt/sdcard. I have resubmitted all builds from 2013-10-31 to now for both nexus ones and the droid pro. Hopefully the devices will be more reliable. It may also be the case that the older sdcards are not as unreliable as initially thought.

I also noticed that Autophone’s workers use devicemanager’s getDeviceRoot() to determine if a device is still responsive. Since the value is cached, this test is ineffective in determining if a device is still responding.